Futures edited by Peter Crowther

Eleven people attended the discussion of Futures. The book is an anthology of four hard SF novellas written by prominent British authors. The Reading Group had discussed books by all but one of these writers previously. Since we talked about each story separately, this story will group our comments accordingly. Seven of us had read the book.

“Watching Trees Grow” by Peter F. Hamilton is a murder mystery set on an alternate Earth that has a race of extremely long-lived humans. A crime investigation occupies more than two centuries and takes a detective all over the world and eventually on a tour of the solar system to find the murderer. We thought that Hamilton did an elegant job of dropping us in the middle of the

Time Future by Maxine McArthur

Nine people attended this meeting, and three submitted comments by email. Time Future is a first SF novel by an Australian author. It involves a murder mystery on a space station with a female commander. Everyone at the meeting had read at least some of the book, and seven had finished it.

There was a lot to like about this book. The space opera setting and the tone of the book were old-fashioned fun. Commander Halley is a complex and interesting viewpoint character. The political background of the story was interesting, and it sewed the seeds for this story and possibly several sequels. The plot twists of

The Time Machine

We’d originally planned to discuss a book on this date, but Willie Siros got a bunch of free passes to a movie preview and convinced us to postpone the meeting. A large group of Reading Group members and their significant others (at least 20 people total) went to the Metropolitan to see this adaptation of the H. G. Wells novel.

We thought this was a well-crafted action movie full of impressive computer-generated images of time passing quickly. We liked the performances of Guy